Long term linkbait

Most people think that linkbait is a quick solution to build a few thousand natural links in a week using social media sites.

My favourite type of linkbait is one that keeps building links for months and even years on end. This type of linkbait has no expiry date and will help your site far more than a quick article that hits the Digg front page. Long term linkbait helps your Technorati rankings much more as they only count links from within the last 6 months.

I’ve tried a few different long term linkbait articles on BlogStorm. The most popular were the Google Analytics Tutorial and the Ultimate Guide to htaccess. These attract traffic from Google and should continue to attract links for a few years as long as I keep them updated on a regular basis.

If the posts become really outdated I will probably rewrite the article and 301 redirect the old version to the new version. Most information on the web is totally out of date and yet still ranks well in Google – you don’t want to tarnish your brand by giving people incorrect information just because they found an article on your site written in 2004.

The promotion of long term linkbait is exactly the same as normal linkbait. You need to get your content in front of as many eyes as possible. The most important thing is your page ranks well in Google so that it can be found and cited by webmasters researching your target subject. In the first few days it helps to kick start the links by seeding your content on social media sites but don’t be too concerned if this fails – unlike normal linkbait you have a much longer window for success.

AboutPatrick Altoft

Patrick is the Director of Strategy at Branded3 and has spent the last 11 years working on the SEO strategies of some of the UK's largest brands. Patrick’s SEO knowledge and experience is highly regarded by many, and he’s regularly invited to speak at the world’s biggest search conferences and events.

http://antphilosophy.com Mikael

Hi Patrick, when you have written tons and tons of advice, how do you keep track of which ones are no longer current?

http://paquito4ever.blogspot.com Paquito

Well, thank you for the info: I promise to try to apply your findings (I’ll read them carefully ).

Long term linkbait has worked out for me. I took a list of 200 free PC games that made the frontpage of Digg over a year ago and put it on my site several months ago.http://esgameservers.com/freepcgames.html

It made the front page of Digg as well as many other smaller but still popular websites. Since then, it has continued to gain backlinks without much work on my part.

The site also ranks well for the term “free PC games” plus hundreds of other low volume keywords that send me a visitor or two a day each.

I think informational content like tutorials, guides, and lists are the only way to make link bait longterm. News will only work temporarily.

http://promoinnovations.com Carl Coddington

Good Article. It points out those “obvious” things that we tend to forget. Thank you.

http://blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

Mikael, I would check to see which of your posts get the most traffic each month and see if any of them contain out of date information.

If you see some with lots of traffic then there is clearly demand for them so a rewrite would be a good idea if they are out of date.

http://merchantos.com/makebeta/ Justin Laing

I’ve just started to write linkbait. I was I delayed starting because I figured if you didn’t make it to the front page of Digg you were out of luck. I changed my thinking on the matter in line with the ideas in this post. It’s been a great way for me to get started in a way that is less daunting.

I’ve written 3 tutorials and probably have gotten about 150 links from them in the two weeks (according to Yahoo).

Would you consider that a success? How do you go about getting the initial eyeballs to kick start the process? I’ve submitted to digg/reddit/stumble and posted them on tutorial sites (good-tutorials and goodphptutorials). Is there anything else you’d recommend?

http://blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

Justin, that sounds like a success to me! Promote anywhere that you think people will see and enjoy your content.

http://www.ladadadada.net/articles/apache_regex_guide Dave

Speaking of your Ultimate Guide to .htaccess (which I quite liked, by the way) I have written a guide that would serve as a good companion to yours. It’s all about the finer details of how Apache regular expressions work. mod_rewrite becomes much less voodoo and much more powerful when you actually understand what each and every character in your regex does.

http://www.networkingclubs.co.uk Karl Craig-West

What a brilliant post. Far too many people in my view only take a short-term view on link building, and that even includes SEO companies.